Authors
- Agbor, Stephen, Department of Business Administration and Management, Delta State Polytechnic, Ogwashi-Uku
- Ale Pius Omote, Department of Human Resource Management, Delta State Polytechnic, Ogwashi-Uku
- Idu Christian Nduka, Department of Production and Operation Management, Delta State Polytechnic, Ogwashi-Uku
Abstract
New media entrepreneurship is the internet-enabled entrepreneurship that seeks to provide students with the knowledge, skills and motivations to encourage entrepreneurial success in a variety of settings. New media entrepreneurship education consists of three ingredients, namely; creativity; innovation and entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship education, in particular, the new media entrepreneurship has been neglected recently in most of Nigeria tertiary institutions, even in the face of current economic, unemployment and energy crises. This current dispensation requires graduates who will be “job creators” and not “job seekers.” With this in view, this paper argues that the new media entrepreneurship education and empowerment for youths at the tertiary institution has an immense importance for youth empowerment and employment for the production of the manpower that is needed in Nigeria labor market. The paper deems new media entrepreneurship education as the most needed education for the development, technological emancipation and industrial expansion of the nation economy. It will tremendously assists in career choice, job placement and gainful employment. It is against this backdrop that the paper makes some propositions on the framework for educating and empowering youths in tertiary institutions of learning. The paper concludes that these proposed strategies and steps will be useful in acquiring new media entrepreneurship skills for students, especially those on the verge of completion. BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY Youth population is increasing explosively particularly in developing countries as a result of rapid urbanization. This increase is bringing large number of social and economic problems. For instance the impacts of job and training availability, and the physical, social and cultural quality of urban environment on young people are enormous, and affect their health, life-styles, and well-being (Gleeson & Sipe 2006). Besides this, globalization and technological developments are affecting youth in urban areas in all parts of the world, both positively and negatively (Robertson, 1995). New media entrepreneurship is an internet enabled entrepreneurship whose creation and ownership of a small enterprise or organization as well as activity add at least one voice or innovation to the media market place. New media entrepreneurship is a technological appreciation to the general term entrepreneurship that introduces students to the basic concepts of entrepreneurship which is now made possible over the internet or the World Wide Web. It blends instructions on the overall entrepreneurship concepts on how the internet and digital technologies are enabling individuals that uses it to run and own businesses online which transforms our media economic. The place of internet in creating an enabling environment for people to do businesses online cannot be over emphasized as Panthos (2012)puts; internet users are persons who make use of the internet from any geographical location, while Trading Economies (2014) describes internet users as people with access to the World Wide Network. According to the Culture-ist (2013), there are more than two billion internet users worldwide, this figure is rising everyday as more people have access to digital devices and internet connection becomes cheaper. In fact, the Voices of American (2014) states that the United Nations Telecommunications Agency said there will be almost three billion internet users by the end of 2014 and two third of the users will be in developing countries which Nigeria happens to be part of. The new media which is an enabling factor of entrepreneurship online refers to on demand access to content anytime, anywhere, on any digital service, as well as interactive user feedback, creative participation and community formation around the media content. An important of these new media is the “democratization” of the creation, publishing, distribution and the consumption of the media content. Most technologies described as “new media” are digital, often having characteristics of being manipulated, networkable, dense, compressible and interactive. Some examples may be the internet websites, computer multimedia, video games CD-ROMs and DVD. Some examples of